Posted inArt

Lois Dodd’s Paintings of the Ephemeral

In recent weeks, I have written about what I have defined as a grown-up painter, as opposed to what I called “the latest manifestation of a male adolescent painter, a clichéd archetype that gained traction in the Neo-Expressionist ‘80s, with the rise of Julian Schnabel, and has not been thrown over because lots of people still find this sort of chest thumping entertaining.”

Posted inArt

Paintings Like Sand in Your Teeth: John Walker at Seal Point

Disclosure, in John Walker’s paintings, comes slowly. A dominant motif — zigzag stripes ranging up, down and across the canvas — colonizes the surface, establishing it as a realm of aggressively brushed abstract patterns. Then one by one, various incidentals emerge — a densely wooded island, a rocky outcropping, the flat disk of the sun — and suddenly you’re looking at a vertically tilted, crazily Cubistic landscape.